NHS Scotland has signed a four-year, £360,000 contract with software provider Advanced in a bid to make financial reporting quicker and more efficient.
Advanced already supplies NHS Scotland with a financial management system, eFinancials, for a range of services across Scotland’s 22 health boards. It interfaces with a number of the NHS’s procurement, payroll and local pharmacy or payment systems.
The new deal will see the software provider delivering a business analytics application in partnership with IBM, which is due to go live in August 2016.
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Colin White, national finance systems manager at NHS Scotland, said that tests had suggested that reports could be generated “significantly quicker – with some reports generating results in seconds rather than hours”.
The new system, which will act as a gateway between eFinancials and a business intelligence system for financial reports, will provide analysts and accountants with access to real-time data without affecting the live operational database.
White sad that, because the system replicates data in real-time, it is up-t-date and can be retrieved around 50 to 500 times faster.
“By speeding up report production and improving access to real-time data, staff will spend less time on report running and more time on analysing the information produced,” White said.
“With data readily available at our fingertips, we will be able to use that information for more informed analysis, enabling us to drive performance across the entire organisation.”
